The Clone Redemption

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ava waited for me in my billet. What else could she do? As the only woman aboard the Churchill, she didn’t dare leave the protection of my quarters. Fighting the effects of a growing depression, she sat on my rack, watching a movie on a pair of mediaLink shades. When she heard me come in, she tore off the shades.

In better times, those shades could have provided news and editorial; now they only accessed preprogrammed materials—books, movies, and educational curricula that had been created a decade earlier.

“I was watching your movie,” she said.

“My movie?” I asked.

“The Battle for Little Man.”

The name did not register for a few seconds. Then it hit me. The Battle for Little Man, an old propaganda film released at the beginning of the Mogat Wars, depicted a battle in which a division of Marines was sent to an unsettled planet called Little Man. We went expecting to find a small detachment of Morgan Atkins Believers. What we found was an army that outnumbered us two to one. Outnumbered and cut off from help, we made our stand. I was one of only seven survivors.

The movie was made at a time when I was listed as MISSING IN ACTION AND PRESUMED DEAD, opening the door for the filmmakers to portray me as a natural-born.

“You don’t look a thing like Sean Gregory,” Ava said. Gregory was the square-jawed male model who played natural-born me.

“Really? I thought that was the most accurate part of the movie.”

“You’re much better-looking than Sean,” Ava said. She acted like she was in a playful mood, but I could see through the cracks. She didn’t call me “Honey.” That was a sure tipoff. She also sounded more sincere than brassy. When Ava was playful, she liked to sound tough.

“I knew that,” I said, trying to play along.

“I’m not kidding. You should see Sean in person.”

“He isn’t six feet tall and covered with muscles?” I asked.

Ava pretended to have to think that over, pausing, mulling over the words, scratching her chin, and finally saying, “Well, he is pretty tall.”

“And muscular?” I asked.

“He does have big arms …and that chest …” Her olivine-colored eyes became dreamy. Had I dredged up old memories or fantasies?

It felt nice to flirt with Ava even though I could tell she was putting on an act. I wished things had worked out differently. I wished I could have given her what she wanted and that she had not left me for some other man. I wished the people in charge on Terraneau had listened to me, and the girls in Ava’s orphanage had not been incinerated.

Wishes were like intentions; they counted for shit.

“We’re meeting the Cygnus Central Fleet at Providence Kri,” I said. “I’m going to leave you there for a little while.”

“How long of a little while?” Ava asked, no longer pretending to smile.

“I don’t know. You’ll be a lot safer there than you would be on a ship. The Unifieds aren’t attacking planets.”

She looked at me, studying me closely, her arms folded across her chest. She said, “The aliens are.” Her eyes marched back and forth across my face, seeming to take in every detail. God, she was beautiful.

“You’ll be safer on a planet than you would be on a ship,” I said. “At least you will be for a little while.”

“You live for this. You live to fight, don’t you?” she asked.

“You live for this …” The words echoed in my mind. The war did not belong to the Navy or the empire; it belonged to me.

“The Unifieds haven’t asked for a truce,” I said. “The aliens are still scorching planets.”

“I hoped maybe Terraneau was the end of it,” she said.

The end of what? I said, “The aliens are going to attack every planet we have until they erase us from the galaxy. The war with the Unifieds is just a distraction. We’re like two kids fighting over a toy while their house burns down around them.”

Ava put up a hand to stop me. She did not want to talk about aliens or reality.

Hearing me mention the Avatari ended the charade. She stood there, her eyes twitching back and forth as if she were having some sort of seizure. Her arms dropped to her sides, and her hands formed fists. “They kill everyone,” she said. “They killed my girls.”

She thought about what she had just said. “My girls …my girls, they had their whole lives ahead of them.”

When I did not answer, she stared up at me. A few seconds passed, before she asked, “How long do we have before the Avatari reach Providence Kri?”

“I don’t know. I think it will be one of the last planets they hit before they attack Earth.”

“Earth?”

I needed to sleep, not talk. I had an hour or two to rest while Mars built FM transmitters to use as broadcast keys.

Freeman was in his quarters trying to reach Sweetwater and Breeze. We had not heard back from them yet, and I began to wonder if perhaps they now considered us the enemy.

While Ava and I discussed life, the galaxy, and the Avatari, Captain Cutter sailed the Churchill into a thousand-mile-wide zone flooded with highly charged electrical current from the local broadcast station. As the ship entered that zone, great tendrils of voltage formed around her hull, creating a glow so bright it could leave a man blinded. The streaks of electricity running the length of the ship carried so many joules that they would incinerate the entire crew had the ship not been properly insulated.

The Churchill, a Perseus-class fighter carrier, had automatic tint shields on her viewports and insulated tiles along the length of her hull. As we approached the zone, Klaxons sounded, signaling the crew to return to stations, and the Churchill passed from the Scutum-Crux Arm of the Milky Way to the Cygnus Arm, a journey of more than twenty thousand light-years, in a matter of seconds.

A flash of electricity so bright it could be detected by the human eye from a million miles away marked the ship’s exit from one arm of the galaxy, and an equally bright flash marked its entrance into the next. That flash was called an “anomaly.”

Every broadcast was a scientific miracle, but pangalactic travel had become so mundane that the crew of the Churchill did not even think about it.